Day Forty-eight - Butterfly on a wheel

So, right off the bat, on the very first day of school I connected with a couple of somewhat like-minded outcasts. You see, this was a preppie kind of school, where most everyone knew each other almost from first grade. As such, me and these kids - Victor and Haykal - didn't really fit in. It was easy to connect with Victor - he was a metalhead as well, and being tall, muscular, his blonde buzzed off, and with a bushy goatee, he seemed like the spitting image of a very young Phil Anselmo, Pantera's lead vocalist. Now, Haykal, he was a different matter altogeher : whereas there were a few of the more alternativ sort, like myself, Victor, and the other older metalheads, pretty much everyone in school dressed the same way middle-class kids did. But Haykal, he almost always wore a suit. This, naturally, set him apart from anyone else there. And coupled with a dusky completion that gave him a sort mysterious middle eastern look, and the fact that he took extremely good care of himself, meant that girls had an eye on him. So we made a quite strange trio that was actually quite close - but also so very different. Victor came from a working class family, and he sort of lived in the projects. His neighbourhood wasn't too bad, but hey, it wasn't that great either. As for Haykal, man, he came from a well-to-do family, his father owned a business of some sort that was apparently doing well, and so money was never an issue for them. He lived in a very nice building in a nice part of the city. So, three mostly different guys somehow got bunched together, and somehow we made it work. Oh, these friendships wouldn't last long - I lost touch with Haykal as soon as the school year ended, and Victor, I might've kept in touch with him for a couple more years. But what really mattered were those few months we stuck together. It's a funny thing, but with Haykal, most of that friendship was school-based only, though on occasion we'd go to his place. However, with Victor things transcended that : he was sort of a neophyte when it came to metal, and as Valter was to me some years prior, so I was to Victor, I took to thoroughly educating him on the facets of this world he didn't even know existed yet. And that meant visiting the very few specialized music stores we still had - all of them are which long gone by now - and also we attended a bunch of gigs together. It was around this time that I started taking more of a liking to beer - I'm guessing about a year prior I'd started to drink here and there - but right about then was when the breswskies started to taking a hold of me. It became sort of a ritual when we were together outside of school, and especially so if we went gigging. Maybe it was some sort of rite of passage, seeing just how booze you could down - and not throw up.